Trotskyist

Tendency of the
Campaign for a
Marxist Party,
PO Box 107,
Stockport,
England, SK6
No to Stalinist Lies about the Spanish Socialist
Revolution!
Delores Ibárruri was a Counterrevolutionary
Murderer!
Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom showed a huge audience of youth and workers the
counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War. But today Philosophy Football
wants to ‘celebrate’ Delores Ibárruri’s vacuous and demagogic speech defending Stalinism’s
appalling record on the Popular Front of seventy years ago (1 Nov. 1938). Here she defended
the Stalinist two stage theory of revolution where it was proposed that the main task was to
defend bourgeois democracy and the working class had to wait for socialism until ‘democracy’
was restored. When they would not they had to be shot to maintain the Popular Front. It all
came down to appeasing Hitler – less than ten months after the speech Molotov signed his
pact with Ribbentrop. And today a broad array of radical artists and trade union ‘left’
bureaucrats are seeking to burnish their leftism by association with a supposedly
revolutionary or at least a very radical leftist individual.
Who was Delores Ibárruri?
Dolores Ibárruri was a revolutionary fighter politically corrupted by the
counter-revolutionary politics of Stalinism to betray her class. She described
the fighting in the streets of Barcelona in May 1937 as a ‘fascist
anarchotrotskyist putsch’. This word had the advantage that it labelled all
revolutionary opponents of the bourgeoisie in Spain as agents of Franco. She
was the public face of Stalinism whose NKVD agents hunted down and
executed thousands of revolutionary fighters from the United Marxist
Workers Party (POUM), National Confederation of Workers (CNT) and the
Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) on the basis that if you did not support
bourgeois parliamentarianism you were a fascist. By armed insurrection the
Spanish workers had seized the factories, collectivised the land and set up
their own popular committees which ruled the local areas; this was actual
workers’ rule which only lacked a workers’ state or a revolutionary junta to
organise it in the parts of Spain where they had thwarted Franco’s coup.
There are no words for this other than the socialist revolution. The tasks that
Ibárruri’s Stalinists set themselves were firstly, to prevent this revolution
from seizing state power, secondly, to reverse its gains in order to cement
an alliance with Britain and France, and thirdly, when this failed, to neutralise
the threat from Hitler by signing a pact with him in which they naively placed
their full confidence.

Kidnapping and Execution of the POUM Leader Andres Nin

The Stalinist General Alexander Orlov used his NKVD agents to deal with left-wing opponents of the Communists in
Republican held areas. This included the arrest and execution of leaders of the POUM, CNT and FAI. He was responsible
for fabricating the evidence which led to the arrest and purge of the leaders of the POUM, many of whom vanished. The
evidence also suggests he directed the kidnapping and execution of the POUM leader Andrés Nin on 20 June 1937. In a
report to his superiors in Moscow, dated August 1937, Orlov outlined his plan for the capture and liquidation of the
Austrian Socialist Kurt Landau. His deputy, Stanislav Vaupshasov, managed the construction of a crematorium for the
untraceable disposal of enemies. Erwin Wolf, Trotsky's former secretary, and Mark Rein, son of a Menshevik leader,
disappeared in Spain, the victims of Orlov's terror. The Soviet Union were the main suppliers of military aid to the
Republican Army. This included 1,000 aircraft, 900 tanks, 1,500 artillery pieces, 300 armoured cars, 15,000 machine-
guns, 30,000 automatic firearms, 30,000 mortars, 500,000 riles and 30,000 tons of ammunition. The USSR took Spain’s
gold reserves; the world's fourth largest, in payment for its ‘assistance’ (from Issue 84 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM
JOURNAL Published Autumn 1999 Copyright © International Socialism).
The Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov declared in autumn 1939:
“During the last few months such concepts as 'aggression' and
'aggressor' have acquired a new concrete content, have taken on
another meaning...Now...it is Germany that is striving for a quick
end to the war, for peace, while England and France, who only
yesterday were campaigning against aggression, are for
continuation of the war and against concluding a peace. Roles, as
you see, change...The ideology of Hitlerism, like any other
ideological system, can be accepted or rejected - that is a matter of
one's political views. But everyone can see that an ideology cannot
be destroyed by force...Thus it is not only senseless, it is criminal to
wage such a war as a war for 'the destruction of Hitlerism,' under
the false flag of a struggle for democracy.”

Why the Truth Matters ...

Surely it does not matter today who did what in Spain so long ago? The International Brigaders were brave fighters even
if they did not understand anything about socialist revolution and believed everything they were told by Stalin’s
professional liars. But it is only on the basis of the truth that we can even begin to fight anew for the socialist revolution
and communist future. In truth neither the POUM nor the CNT/FAI leaders provided any revolutionary alternative to
Stalinism, and ultimately betrayed the revolution themselves. They had entered the anti-working class Popular Front
Catalan Generalidad government and refused to support the Barcelona working class in the terrible May Days of 1937
when the revolution was bloodily suppressed by the Stalinists and right Socialists. However they had the overwhelming
bulk of the best revolutionists in their ranks, the left Socialists followers of Largo Caballero had many also but the right
Socialist of Indalecio Prieto and Ibárruri’s Stalinists had none and stood to the right of all the working class forces in Spain
at the time. The bourgeoisie themselves had almost no support in these revolutionary times. And Ibárruri’s rehabilitation
is supported by leading trade union bureaucrats; ‘TUC Deputy General Secretary Frances O'Grady...the TUC and
Unison’ and supported by the Stalinist-led International Brigades. Why do they want to sanitise the bloody
counterrevolutionary history of Stalinism in Spain?
Of course it is to defend their own record in dealing with the British working class and to insist that there is no alternative
to this class collaboration. So the history of the most class conscious, revolutionary socialist era in the history of the world
working class, the revolutionary offensive of the Spanish workers from 1936-39, must be falsified and denigrated and its
champions, from the best to the very inadequate ones, libelled as fascists to deny all workers the aspiration of a socialist
future. They will not succeed! They are allowing Gordon Brown to destroy the welfare state, they acquiesce in the foul
anti-immigrant campaigns of the governments which is assisting the rise of the fascists of the BNP and they are clearly
announcing that when revolutionary struggles break out in Britain they will seek to compromise these to defeat in order
to defend capitalism and maintain their privileges within the system, just as they betray all serious struggles for even
partial gains by the working class today. They know the truth of Spain but they do not want the working class to know it
lest they seek an alternative revolutionary socialist leadership. We will fight to let the working class know the truth.
All serious revolutionary socialists and anarchists should cooperate in fighting these falsifications and in
fighting the betrayals of the trade union bureaucrats and Labour leaders, both right and left. We should
unite to defeat these bureaucratic misleaders of the workers movement and their apologists in the
Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party who have collapsed so ignominiously to them in the
Executive of the PCS, Unite and elsewhere. We can win the National Shop Stewards Network to become a
How Ibárruri’s NKVD defended capitalism in Spain
real workers’ fighting organisation, we can defend the immigrant workers and raise demands that no
In the morning the shattered body of Camillo Berneri was found where it had been tossed by the PSUC guards (Stalinists) who
trade union
had seized members
the frail man incollaborate in victimisation
his home the night before. Berneri, and deportation
spiritual of anarchism
leader of Italian immigrant workers
since the deathand begin the
of Malatesta,
construction of revolutionary
leader of the Ancona revolt of 1914,socialist leadership
escaped from Mussolini’sfor the working
clutches, had foughtclass.
the reformists (including the CNT leaders) in
his influential organ, Guerra di Classe. He had described the Stalinist policy in four words: ‘It smells of Noske.’ In ringing words
he had defied Moscow: ‘Crushed between the Prussians and Versailles, the Commune of Paris initiated a fire that lit up the world.
Let the General Godeds of Moscow remember this.’ He had declared to the masses of the CNT: ‘The dilemma “war or revolution”
has no longer any meaning. The only dilemma is: either victory over Franco, thanks to the revolutionary war, or defeat.’ How
terribly true had been his identification of Noske and the Stalinists! As Noske, the Social Democrat, had Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht kidnapped and murdered, so the Stalinist-democrats had assassinated Camillo Berneri.
Honour our comrade, Camillo Berneri. Let us remember him with the love we bear our Karl and Rosa. As I write,
comrades, I cannot help weeping, weeping for Camillo Berneri. The list of our martyrs is as long as the life of the working class.
Fortunate were those among them who fell fighting the open class enemy, fell in the midst of battle with their comrades beside
them. Most terrible of all is it to die alone at the stiletto-point of those who call themselves socialists or communists, as Karl and
Rosa died, as our comrades are dying in the execution chambers of Siberian exile. A special anguish was that of Camillo Berneri.
He died at the hands of ‘Marxists-Leninists-Stalinists’, while his closest friends, Montseny, Garcia Oliver, Peiro, Vasquez, were
handing over the Barcelona proletariat to his executioners. Thursday, May 6, 1937. Let us remember that day. (Felix Morrow
Revolution and Counter Revolution in Spain New Park Publications Limited, 1963, first pub. 1938)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/morrow-felix/1938/revolution-spain/index.htm).